WE have seen that the Hebrews were originally polytheists, and that their ethnical god Jahweh seems to have been worshipped by them in early times under the material form of a cylindrical stone pillar. Or rather, to speak more naturally, the object they so worshipped they regarded as a god, and called Jahweh. The question next confronts us, how from this humble beginning did Israel attain to the pure monotheism of its later age? What was there in the position or conditions of the Hebrew race which made the later Jews reject all their other gods, and fabricate out of their early national Sacred Stone the most sublime, austere, and omnipotent deity that humanity has known?
The answer, I believe, to this pregnant question is partly to be found in a certain general tendency of the Semitic mind; partly in the peculiar political and social state of the Israelitish tribes during the ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries before the Christian era. Or, to put the proposed solution of the problem, beforehand, in a still simpler form, Hebrew monotheism was to some extent the result of a syncretic treatment of all the gods, in the course of which the attributes and characters of each became merged in the other, only the names (if anything) remaining distinct; and to some extent the result of the intense national patriotism, of which the ethnical god Jahweh was at once the outcome, the expression, and the fondest hope. The belief that Jahweh fought for Israel, and that by trust in Jahweh alone could Israel hold her own against Egypt and Assyria, wildly fanatical as it appears to us to-day, and utterly disproved by all the facts of the case as it ultimately was, nevertheless formed a central idea of the Hebrew patriots, and resulted by slow degrees in the firm establishment first of an exclusive, and afterwards of a truly monotheistic Jahweh-cult.
It is one of Ernest Renan’s brilliant paradoxes that the Semitic mind is naturally monotheistic. As a matter of fact, the Semitic mind has shown this native tendency in its first stages by everywhere evolving pretty much the same polytheistic pantheon as that evolved by every other group of human beings everywhere. Nevertheless, there is perhaps this kernel of truth in Renan’s paradoxical contention; the Semites, more readily than most other people, merge the features of their deities one in the other. That is not, indeed, by any means an exclusive Semitic trait. We saw already, in dealing with the Egyptian religion, how all the forms and functions of the gods faded at last into an inextricable mixture, an olla podrida of divinity, from which it was practically impossible to disentangle with certainty the original personalities of Ra and Turn, of Amen and Osiris, of Neith and Isis, of Ptah and Apis. Even in the relatively fixed and individualised pantheon of Hellas, it occurs often enough that confusions both of person and prerogative obscure the distinctness of the various gods. Aphrodite and Herakles are polymorphic in their embodiments. But in the Semitic religions, at least in that later stage where we first come across them, the lineaments of the different deities are so blurred and indefinite that hardly anything more than mere names can with certainty be recognised. No other gods are so shadowy and so vague. The type of this pantheon is that dim figure of El-Shaddai, the early and terrible object of Hebrew worship, of whose attributes and nature we know positively nothing, but who stands in the background of all Hebrew thought as the embodiment of the nameless and trembling dread begotten on man’s soul by the irresistible and ruthless forces of nature.
This vagueness and shadowiness of the Semitic religious conceptions seems to depend to some extent upon the inartistic nature of the Semitic culture. The Semite seldom carved the image of his god. Roman observers noted with surprise that the shrine of Carmel contained no idol. But it depended also upon deep-seated characteristics of the Semitic race. Melancholy, contemplative, proud, reserved, but strangely fanciful, the Arab of to-day perhaps gives us the clue to the indefinite nature of early Semitic religious thinking. There never was anether world more ghostly than Sheol; there never were gods more dimly awful than the Elohim who float through the early stories of the Hebrew mystical cycle. Their very names are hardly known to us: they come to us through the veil of later Jehovistic editing with such merely descriptive titles as the God of Abraham, the Terror of Isaac, the Mighty Power, the Most High Deity. Indeed, the true Hebrew, like many other barbarians, seems to have shrunk either from looking upon the actual form of his god itself, or from pronouncing aloud his proper name. His deity was shrouded in the darkness of an ark or the deep gloom of an inner tent or sanctuary; the syllables that designated the object of his worship were never uttered in full, save on the most solemn occasions, but were shirked or slurred over by some descriptive epithet. Even the unpronounceable title of Jahweh itself appears from our documents to have been a later name bestowed during the Exodus on an antique god: while the rival titles of the Baal and the Molech mean nothing more than the Lord and the King respectively. An excessive reverence forbade the Semite to know anything of his god’s personal appearance or true name, and so left the features of almost all the gods equally uncertain and equally formless.
But besides the difficulty of accurately distinguishing between the forms and functions of the different Semitic deities which even their votaries must have felt from the beginning, there was a superadded difficulty in the developed creed, due to the superposition of elemental mysticism and nature-worship upon the primitive cult of ancestral ghosts as gods and goddesses. Just as Ra, the sun, was identified in the latest ages with almost every Egyptian god, so solar ideas and solar myths affected at last the distinct personality of almost every Semitic deity. The consequence is that all the gods become in the end practically indistinguishable: one is so like the other that different interpreters make the most diverse identifications, and are apparently justified in so doing (from the mythological standpoint) by the strong solar or elemental family likeness which runs through the whole pantheon in its later stages. It has even been doubted by scholars of the older school whether Jahweh is not himself a form of his great rival Baal: whether both were not at bottom identical—mere divergent shapes of one polyonymous sun-god. To us, who recognise in every Baal the separate ghost-god of a distinct tomb, such identification is clearly impossible.
To the worshippers of the Baalim or of Jahweh themselves, however, these abstruser mythological problems never presented themselves. The difference of name and of holy place was quite enough for them, in spite of essential identity of attribute or nature. They would kill one another for the sake of a descriptive epithet, or risk death itself rather than offer up sacrifices at a hostile altar.
Nevertheless, various influences conspired, here as elsewhere, to bring about a gradual movement of syncretism—that is to say, of the absorption of many distinct gods into one; the final identification of several deities originally separate. What those influences were we must now briefly consider.
In the first place, we must recollect that while in Egypt, with its dry and peculiarly preservative climate, mummies, idols, tombs, and temples might be kept unchanged and undestroyed for ages, in almost all other countries rain, wind, and time are mighty levellers of human handicraft. Thus, while in Egypt the cult of the Dead Ancestor survives as such quite confessedly and openly for many centuries, in most other countries the tendency is for the actual personal objects of worship to be more and more forgotten; vague gods and spirits usurp by degrees the place of the historic man; rites at last cling rather to sites than to particular persons. The tomb may disappear; and yet the sacred stone may be reverenced still with the accustomed veneration. The sacred stone may go; and yet the sacred tree may be watered yearly with the blood of victims. The tree itself may die; and yet the stump may continue to be draped on its anniversary with festal apparel. The very stump may decay; and yet gifts of food or offerings of rags may be cast as of old into the sacred spring that once welled beside it. The locality thus grows to be holy in itself, and gives us one clear and obvious source of later nature-worship.
The gods or spirits who haunt such shrines come naturally to be thought of with the lapse of ages as much like one another. Godship is all that can long remain of their individual attributes. Their very names are often unknown; they are remembered merely as the lord of Lebanon, the Baal of Mount Peor. No wonder that after a time they get to be practically identified with one another, while similar myths are often fastened by posterity to many of them together. Indeed, we know that new names, and even foreign intrusive names, frequently take the place of the original titles, while the god himself still continues to be worshipped as the same shapeless stone, with the same prescribed rites, in the same squalid or splendid temples. Thus, Melcarth, the Baal of Tyre, was adored in later days under the Greek name of Herakles; and thus at Bablos two local deities, after being identified first with the Syrian divinities, Adonis and Astarte, were identified later with the Egyptian divinities, Osiris and Isis. Yet the myths of the place show us that through all that time the true worship was paid to the dead stump of a sacred tree, which was said to have grown from the grave of a god—in other words, from the tumulus of an ancient chieftain. No matter how greatly mythologies change, these local cults remain ever constant; the sacred stones are here described as haunted by djinns, and there as memorials of Christian martyrs; the holy wells are dedicated here to nymph or hero, and receive offerings there to saint or fairy. So the holy oaks of immemorial worship in England become “Thor’s oaks” under Saxon heathendom, and “Gospel oaks” under mediaeval Christianity.
Finally, in the latest stages of worship, an attempt is always made to work in the heavenly bodies and the great energies of nature into the mythological groundwork or theory of religion. Every king is the descendant of the sun, and every great god is therefore necessarily the sun in person. Endless myths arise from these phrases, which are mistaken by mythologists for the central facts and sources of religion. But they are nothing of the kind. Mysticism and symbolism can never be primitive; they are well-meant attempts by cultivated religious thinkers of later days to read deep-seated meaning into the crude ideas and still cruder practices of traditional religion. I may add that Dr. Robertson Smith’s learned and able works are constantly spoiled in this way by his dogged determination to see nature-worship as primitive, where it is really derivative, as the earliest starting-point, where it is really the highest and latest development.
Clearly, when all gods have come to be more or less solar in their external and acquired features, the process of identification and internationalisation is proportionately easy.
The syncretism thus brought about in the Hebrew religion by the superposition of nature-worship on the primitive cult must have paved the way for the later recognition of monotheism, exactly as we know it did in the esoteric creed of Egypt, by making all the gods so much alike that worshippers had only to change the name of their deity, not the attributes of the essential conception. Let us look first how far this syncretism affected the later idea of Jahweh, the phallic stone-god preserved in the ark; and then let us enquire afterward how the patriotic reaction against Assyrian aggression put the final coping-stone on the rising fabric of monotheistic Jahweh-worship.
It is often asserted that Jahweh was worshipped in many places in Israel under the form of a golden calf. That is to say, Hebrews who set up images of a metal bull believed themselves nevertheless to be worshipping Jahweh. Even the prophets of the eighth century regard the cult of the bull as a form of Jahweh-worship, though not a form to which they can personally give their approbation. But the bull is probably in its origin a distinct god from the stone in the ark; and if its worship was identified with that of the Rock of Israel, it could be only by a late piece of syncretic mysticism. Perhaps the link here, as in the case of Apis, was a priestly recognition of the bull as symbolising the generative power of nature; an idea which would be peculiarly appropriate to the god whose great function it was to encourage fruitfulness. But in any case, we cannot but see in this later calf-worship a superadded element wholly distinct from the older cult of the sacred stone, just as the worship of Ra was wholly distinct in origin from the totem-cult of Mnevis, or as the worship of Amen was wholly distinct from that of Khem and Osiris. The stone-god and the bull-god merge at last into one, much as at a far later date the man Jesus merges into the Hebrew god, and receives more reverence in modern faiths than the older deity whom he practically replaces.
Even in the Temple at Jerusalem itself, symbols of bull-worship were apparently admitted. The altar upon which the daily sacrifice was burnt had four horns; and the laver in the court, the “brazen sea,” was supported upon the figures of twelve oxen. When we remember that the Molech had the head of a bull, we can hardly fail to see in these symbols a token of that gradual syncretism which invariably affects all developed pantheons in all civilised countries.
Much more important are the supposed signs of the later identification of Jahweh with the sun, and his emergence as a modified and transfigured sun-god. It may seem odd at first that such a character could ever be acquired by a sacred stone, did we not recollect the exactly similar history of the Egyptian obelisk, which in like manner represents, first and foremost, the upright pillar or monolith—that is to say, the primitive gravestone—but secondarily and derivatively, at once the generative principle and a ray of the sun. With this luminous analogy to guide us in our search, we shall have little difficulty in recognising how a solar character may have been given to the later attributes and descriptions of Jahweh.
I do not myself attach undue importance to these solar characteristics of the fully evolved Jahweh; but so much has been made of them by a certain school of modern thinkers that I must not pass them over in complete silence.
To his early worshippers, then, as we saw, Jahweh was merely the stone in the ark. He dwelt there visibly, and where the ark went, there Jahweh went with it. But the later Hebrews—say in the eighth century—had acquired a very different idea of Jahweh’s dwelling-place. Astrological and solar ideas (doubtless Akkadian in origin) had profoundly modified their rude primitive conceptions. To Amos and to the true Isaiah, Jahweh dwells in the open sky above and is “Jahweh of hosts,” the leader among the shining army of heaven, the king of the star-world. “Over those celestial bodies and celestial inhabitants Jahweh rules”; they surround him and execute his commands: the host of heaven are his messengers—in the more familiar language of our modern religion, “the angels of the Lord,” the servants of Jahweh. To Micah, heaven is “the temple of Jahweh’s holiness”: “God on high,” is the descriptive phrase by which the prophet alludes to him. In all this we have reached a very different conception indeed from that of the early and simple-minded Israelites who carried their god with them on an ox-cart from station to station.
Furthermore, light and fire are constantly regarded by these later thinkers as manifestations of Jahweh; and even in editing the earlier legends they introduce such newer ideas, making “the glory of Jahweh” light up the ark, or appear in the burning bush, or combining both views, the elder and the younger, in the pillar of fire that preceded the nomad horde of Israel in the wilderness. Jahweh is said to “send” or to “cast fire” from heaven, in which expressions we see once more the advanced concept of an elemental god, whose voice is the thunder, and whose weapon the lightning. All these are familiar developments of the chief god in a pantheon. Says Zechariah in his poem, “Ask ye of Jahweh rain in the time of the latter showers: Jahweh will make the lightnings.” Says Isaiah, “The light of Israel shall be for a fire, And his holy one for a flame”; “Behold, the name of Jahweh cometh from afar, His anger burneth, and violently the smoke riseth on high: His lips are full of indignation, And his tongue is as a devouring fire.” In these and a hundred other passages that might be quoted, we seem to see Jahweh envisaged to a great extent as a sun-god, and clothed in almost all the attributes of a fiery Molech.
Sometimes these Molech-traits come very close indeed to those of the more generally acknowledged fire-gods. “Thus we read,” says Kuenen, “that ‘the glory of Jahweh was like devouring fire on the top of Mount Sinai’; and that ‘his angel appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: the bush burned with fire but was not consumed.’” So Jahweh himself is called “a consuming fire, a jealous god”: and a poet thus describes his appearance, “Smoke goeth up out of his nostrils, And fire out of his mouth devoureth; coals of fire are kindled by him.” These are obviously very derivative and borrowed prerogatives with which to deck out the primitive stone pillar that led the people of Israel up out of Egypt. Yet we know that precisely analogous evolutions have been undergone by other stone-gods elsewhere.
Once more, though this is to anticipate a little, the later Jahweh-worship seems to have absorbed into itself certain astrological elements which were originally quite alien to it, belonging to the cult of other gods. Such for example is the institution of the Sabbath, the unlucky day of the malign god Kewân or Saturn, on which it was undesirable to do any kind of work, and on which accordingly the superstitious Semite rested altogether from his weekly labours. The division of the lunar month (the sacred period of Astarte, the queen of heaven) into four weeks of seven days each, dedicated in turn to the gods of the seven planets, belongs obviously to the same late cult of the elemental and astrological gods, or, rather, of the gods with whom these heavenly bodies were at last identified under Akkadian influence. The earlier prophets of the exclusive Jahweh-worship denounce as idolatrous such observation of the Sabbath and the astrological feasts—“Your Sabbaths and your new moons are an abomination to me”; and according to Amos, Kewân himself had been the chief idolatrous object of worship by his countrymen in the wilderness. Later on, however, the Jehovistic party found itself powerless to break the current of superstition on the Sabbath question, and a new modus vivendi was therefore necessary. They arranged a prudent compromise. The Sabbath was adopted bodily into the monotheistic Jahweh-worship, and a mythical reason was given for its institution and its sacred character which nominally linked it on to the cult of the ethnical god. On that day, said the priestly cosmogonists, Jahweh rested from his labour of creation. In the same way, many other fragments of external cults were loosely attached to the worship of Jahweh by a verbal connection with some part of the revised Jehovistic legend, or else were accredited to national Jehovistic or Jehovised heroes.
Having thus briefly sketched out the gradual changes which the conception of Jahweh himself underwent during the ages when his supremacy was being slowly established in the confederacy of Israel, let us now hark back once more and attack the final problem, Why did the particular cult of Jahweh become at last exclusive and monotheistic?
To begin with, we must remember that from the very outset of the national existence, Jahweh was clearly regarded on all hands as the ethnical god, the special god of Israel. The relation of such ethnical gods to their people has been admirably worked out by Dr. Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites. Even though we cannot, however, accept as historical the view given us of the exodus in the Pentateuch, nor admit that Jahweh played anything like so large a part in the great national migration as is there indicated, it is yet obvious that from the moment when Israel felt itself a nation at all, Jahweh was recognised as its chief deity. He was the “god of Israel,” just as Milcom was the god of the Ammonites, Chemosh the god of Moab, and Ashtaroth the goddess of Sidon. As distinctly as every Athenian, while worshipping Zeus and Hera and Apollo, held Athene to be the special patron of Athens, so did every Israelite, while worshipping the Baalim and the Molech and the local deities generally, hold Jahweh to be the special patron of Israel.
Moreover, from the very beginning, there is reason to suppose that the Israelites regarded Jahweh as their supreme god. Most pantheons finally settle down into a recognised hierarchy, in which one deity or another gradually assumes the first place. So, in Hellas, the supremacy of Zeus was undoubted; so, in Rome, was the supremacy of Jupiter. Sometimes, to be sure, as among our Teutonic ancestors, we see room for doubt between two rival gods: it would be difficult to assign the exact priority to either of the two leading deities: among the English, Woden rather bore it over Thunor; among the Scandinavians, Thor rather bore it over Odin. In Israel, in like manner, there was apparently a time when the Presidency of the Immortals hovered between Jahweh and one or other of the local Baalim. But in the end, and perhaps even from the very beginning, the suffrages of the people were mainly with the sacred stone of the ark. He was the God of Israel, and they were the chosen people of Jahweh.
The custom of circumcision must have proved at once the symbol and in part the cause, in part the effect, of this general devotion of the people to a single supreme god. At first, no doubt, only the first-born or other persons specially dedicated to Jahweh, would undergo the rite which marked them out so clearly as the devotees of the god of fertility. But as time went on, long before the triumph of the exclusive Jahweh-worship, it would seem that the practice of offering up every male child to the national god had become universal. As early as the shadowy reign of David, the Philistines are reproachfully alluded to in our legends as “the uncircumcised”; whence we may perhaps conclude (though the authority is doubtful) that even then circumcision had become coextensive with Israelitish citizenship. Such universal dedication of the whole males of the race to the national god must have done much to ensure his ultimate triumph.
If we look at the circumstances of the Israelites in Palestine, we shall easily see how both religious unity and intense national patriotism were fostered by the very nature of their tenure of the soil; and also why a deity mainly envisaged as a god of generation should have become the most important member of their national pantheon. Their position during the first few centuries of their life in Lower Syria may be compared to that of the Dorians in Peloponnesus: they were but a little garrison in a hostile land fighting incessantly with half-conqùered tributaries and encircling foes; now hard-pressed by rebellions of their internal enemies; and now again rendered subject themselves to the hostile Philistines on their maritime border. The handful of rude warriors who burst upon the land under such bloodthirsty leaders as the mystical Joshua could only hope for success by rapid and constant increase of their numbers, and by avoiding as far as possible those internal quarrels which were always the prelude to national disgrace. To be “a mother in Israel” is the highest hope of every Hebrew woman. Hence it was natural that a god of generation should become the chief among the local deities, and that the promise held out by his priests of indefinite multiplication should make him the most popular and powerful member of the Israelitish pantheon. And though all the stone gods were probably phallic, yet Jahweh, as the ethnical patron, seems most of all to have been regarded as the giver of increase to Israel.
It seems clear, too, that the common worship of Jahweh was at first the only solid bond of union between the scattered and discordant tribes who were afterwards to grow into the Israelitish people. This solidarity of god and tribe has well been insisted on by Professor Robertson Smith as a common feature of all Semitic worship. The ark of Jahweh in its house at Shiloh appears to have formed the general meeting-place for Hebrew patriotism, as the sanctuary of Olympia formed a focus later for the dawning sense of Hellenic unity. The ark was taken out to carry before the Hebrew army, that the god of Israel might fight for his worshippers. Evidently, therefore, from a very early date, Jahweh was regarded in a literal sense as the god of battles, the power upon whom Israel might specially rely to guard it against its enemies. When, as the legends tell us, the national unity was realised under David; when the subject peoples were finally merged into a homogeneous whole; when the last relics of Canaanitish nationality were stamped out by the final conquest of the Jebusites; and when Jerusalem was made the capital of a united Israel, this feeling must have increased both in extent and intensity. The bringing of Jahweh to Jerusalem by David, and the building of his temple by Solomon (if these facts be historical), must have helped to stamp him as the great god of the race: and though Solomon also erected temples to other Hebrew gods, which remained in existence for some centuries, we may be sure that from the date of the opening of the great central shrine, Jahweh remained the principal deity of the southern kingdom at least, after the separation.
There was one characteristic of Jahweh-worship, however, which especially helped to make it at last an exclusive cult, and thus paved the way for its final development into a pure monotheism. Jahweh was specially known to be a “jealous god”: this is a trait in his temperament early and often insisted on. We do not know when or where the famous “Ten Words” were first promulgated; but we have every reason to believe that in essence at least they date from a very antique period. Now, at the head of these immemorial precepts of Jahweh stands the prohibition of placing any other gods before his face. Originally, no doubt, the prohibition meant exactly what it states; that Jahweh would endure no companion gods to share his temple; that wherever he dwelt, he would dwell alone without what the Greeks would have called fellow shrine-sharers. Thus we know that no ashera was to be driven into the ground near Jahweh’s ark; and that when Dagon found himself face to face with the Rock of Israel, he broke in pieces, and could not stand before the awful presence of the great Hebrew Pillar. No more than this, then, was at first demanded by “the jealous god”: he asked of his worshippers that they should keep him apart from the society of all inferior gods, should allow no minor or rival deity to enter his precincts.
Gradually, however, as Jahweh-worship grew deeper, and the conception of godhead became wider and more sublime, the Jahweh-worshipper began to put a stricter interpretation upon the antique command of the jealous god. It was supposed that every circumcised person, every man visibly devoted to Jahweh, owed to Jahweh alone his whole religious service. Nobody doubted as yet, indeed, that other gods existed: but the extreme Jehovists in the later days of national independence held as an article of faith that no true Israelite ought in any way to honour them. An internal religious conflict thus arose between the worshippers of Jahweh and the worshippers of the Baalim, in which, as might be expected, the devotees of the national god had very much the best of it. Exclusive Jahweh-worship became thenceforth the ideal of the extreme Jehovists: they began to regard all other gods as “idols,” to be identified with their images; they began to look upon Jahweh alone as a living god, at least within the bounds of the Israelitish nation.
To this result, another ancient prohibition of the priests of Jahweh no doubt largely contributed. The priesthood held it unlawful to make or multiply images of Jahweh. The one sacred stone enclosed in the ark was alone to be worshipped: and by thus concentrating on Shiloh, or afterwards on Jerusalem, the whole religious spirit of the ethnical cult, they must largely have succeeded in cementing the national unity. Strict Jehovists looked with dislike upon the adoration paid to the bull-images in the northern kingdom, though those, too, were regarded (at least in later days) as representatives of Jahweh. They held that the true god of Abraham was to be found only in the ark at Jerusalem, and that to give to the Rock of Israel human form or bestial figure was in itself a high crime against the majesty of their deity. Hence arose the peculiar Hebrew dislike to “idolatry”; a dislike never equally shared by any but Semitic peoples, and having deep roots, apparently, at once in the inartistic genius of the people and in the profound metaphysical and dreamy character of Semitic thinking. The comparative emptiness of Semitic shrines, indeed, was always a stumbling-block to the Greek, with his numerous and exquisite images of anthropomorphic deities.
All that was now wanted to drive the increasingly exclusive and immaterial Jahweh-worship into pure monotheism for the whole people was the spur of a great national enthusiasm, in answer to some dangerous external attack upon the existence of Israel and of Israel’s god. This final touch was given by the aggression of Assyria, and later of Babylon. For years the two tiny Israelitish kingdoms had maintained a precarious independence between the mighty empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the eighth century, it became certain that they could no longer play their accustomed game of clever diplomacy and polite subjection. The very existence of Israel was at stake; and the fanatical worshippers of Jahweh, now pushed to an extreme of frenzy by the desperate straits to which they were reduced, broke out in that memorable ecstasy of enthusiasm which we may fairly call the Age of the Prophets, and which produced the earliest masterpieces of Hebrew literature in the wild effort to oppose to the arms of the invaders the passive resistance of a supreme Jahweh. In times of old, the prophets say, when Jahweh led the forces of Israel, the horses and the chariots of their enemies counted for naught: if in this crisis Israel would cease to think of aid from Egypt or alliance with Assyria—if Israel would get rid of all her other gods and trust only to Jahweh,—then Jahweh would break asunder the strength of Assyria and would reduce Babylon to nothing before his chosen people.
Such is the language that Isaiah ventured to use in the very crisis of a grave national danger.
Now, strange as it seems to us that any people should have thrown themselves into such a general state of fanatical folly, it is nevertheless true that these extraordinary counsels prevailed in both the Israelitish kingdoms, and that the very moment when the national existence was most seriously imperilled was the moment chosen by the Jehovistic party for vigorously attempting a religious reformation. The downfall of Ephraim only quickened the bigoted belief of the fanatics in Judah that pure Jahweh-worship was the one possible panacea for the difficulties of Israel. Taking advantage of a minority and of a plastic young king, they succeeded in imposing exclusive Jehovism upon the half-unwilling people. The timely forgery of the Book of Deuteromony—the first germ of the Pentateuch—by the priests of the temple at Jerusalem was quickly followed by the momentary triumph of pure Jahweh-worship. In this memorable document, the exclusive cult of Jahweh was falsely said to have descended from the earliest periods of the national existence. Josiah, we are told, alarmed at the denunciations in the forged roll of the law, set himself to work at once to root out by violent means every form of “idolatry.” He brought forth from the house of Jahweh “the vessels that were made for the Baal, and for the Ashera, and for all the Host of Heaven, and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron.” He abolished all the shrines and priesthoods of other gods in the cities of Judah, and put down “them that burned incense to the Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and all the Host of Heaven.” He also brought out the Ashera from the temple of Jahweh, and burnt it to ashes; and “took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire.” And by destroying the temples said to have been built by Solomon for Chemosh, Milcom, and Ashtoreth, he left exclusive and triumphant Jahweh-worship the sole accredited religion of Israel.
All, however, was of no avail. Religious fanaticism could not save the little principality from the aggressive arms of its powerful neighbours. Within twenty or thirty years of Josiah’s reformation, the Babylonians ceased to toy with their petty tributaries, and thrice captured and sacked Jerusalem. The temple of Jahweh was burnt, the chief ornaments were removed, and the desolate site itself lay empty and deserted. The principal inhabitants were transported to Babylonia, and the kingdom of Judah ceased for a time to have any independent existence of any sort.
But what, in this disaster, became of Jahweh himself? How fared or fell the Sacred Stone in the ark, the Rock of Israel, in this general destruction of all his holiest belongings? Strange to say, the Hebrew annalist never stops to tell us. In the plaintive catalogue of the wrongs wrought by the Babylonians at Jerusalem, every pot and shovel and vessel is enumerated, but “the ark of God” is not so much as once mentioned. Perhaps the historian shrank from relating that final disgrace of his country’s deity; perhaps a sense of reverence prevented him from chronicling it; perhaps he knew nothing of what had finally been done with the cherished and time-honoured stone pillar of his ancestors. It is possible, too, that with his later and more etherealised conceptions of the cult of his god, he had ceased to regard the ark itself as the abode of Jahweh, and was unaware that his tribal deity had been represented in the innermost shrine of the temple by a rough-hewn pillar. Be that as it may, the actual fate of Jahweh himself is involved for us now in impenetrable obscurity. Probably the invaders who took away “the treasures of the house of Jahweh, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon, King of Israel, had made,” would care but little for the rude sacred stone of a conquered people. We may conjecture that they broke Jahweh into a thousand fragments and ground him to powder, as Josiah had done with the Baalim and the Ashera, so that his very relics could no longer be recognised or worshipped by his followers. At any rate, we hear no more, from that time forth, of Jahweh himself, as a material existence, or of the ark he dwelt in. His spirit alone survived unseen, to guard and protect his chosen people.
Yet, strange to say, this final disappearance of Jahweh himself, as a visible and tangible god, from the page of history, instead of proving the signal for the utter downfall of his cult and his sanctity, was the very making of Jahweh-worship as a spiritual, a monotheistic, and a cosmopolitan religion. At the exact moment when Jahweh ceased to exist, the religion of Jahweh began to reach its highest and fullest development. Even before the captivity, as we have seen, the prophets and their party had begun to form a most exalted and spiritualised conception of Jahweh’s greatness, Jahweh’s holiness, Jahweh’s unapproachable nature, Jahweh’s superhuman sublimity and omnipotence. But now that the material Jahweh itself, which clogged and cramped their ideas, had disappeared for ever, this spiritual conception of a great Unseen God widened and deepened amazingly. Forbidden by their creed and by Jahweh’s own express command to make any image of their chosen deity, the Hebrews in Babylonia gradually evolved for themselves the notion of a Supreme Ruler wholly freed from material bonds, to be worshipped without image, representative, or symbol; a dweller in the heavens, invisible to men, too high and pure for human eyes to look upon. The conical stone in the ark gave place almost at once to an incorporeal, inscrutable, and almighty Being.
It was during the captivity, too, that pure monotheism became for the first time the faith of Israel. Convinced that desertion of Jahweh was the cause of all their previous misfortunes, the Jews during their exile grew more deeply attached than ever to the deity who represented their national unity and their national existence. They made their way back in time to Judæa, after two generations had passed away, with a firm conviction that all their happiness depended on restoring in ideal purity a cult that had never been the cult of their fathers. A new form of Jahweh-worship had become a passion among those who sat disconsolate by the waters of Babylon. Few if any of the zealots who returned at last to Jerusalem had ever themselves known the stone god who lay shrouded in the ark: it was the etherealised Jahweh who ruled in heaven above among the starry hosts to whom they offered up aspirations in a strange land for the restoration of Israel. In the temple that they built on the sacred site to the new figment of their imaginations, Jahweh was no longer personally present: it was not so much his “house,” like the old one demolished by the Babylonian invaders, as the place where sacrifice was offered and worship paid to the great god in heaven. The new religion was purely spiritual; Jahweh had triumphed, but only by losing his distinctive personal characteristics, and coming out of the crisis, as it were, the blank form or generic conception of pure deity in general.
It is this that gives monotheism its peculiar power, and enables it so readily to make its way everywhere. For monotheism is religion reduced to its single central element; it contains nothing save what every votary of all gods already implicitly believes, with every unnecessary complexity or individuality smoothed away and simplified. Its simplicity recommends it to all intelligent minds; its uniformity renders it the easiest and most economical form of pantheon that man can frame for himself.
Under the influence of these new ideas, before long, the whole annals of Israel were edited and written down in Jehovistic form; the Pentateuch and the older historical books assumed the dress in which we now know them. From the moment of the return from the captivity, too, the monotheistic conception kept ever widening. At first, no doubt, even with the Jews of the Sixth Century, Jahweh was commonly looked upon merely as the ethnical god of Israel. But, in time, the sublimer and broader conception of some few among the earlier poetical prophets began to gain general acceptance, and Jahweh was regarded as in very deed the one true God of all the world—somewhat such a God as Islam and Christendom to-day acknowledge. Still, even so, he was as yet most closely connected with the Jewish people, through whom alone the gentiles were expected in the fulness of time to learn his greatness. It was reserved for a Græco-Jewish Cilician, five centuries later, to fulfil the final ideal of pure cosmopolitan monotheism, and to proclaim abroad the unity of god to all nations, with the Catholic Church as its earthly witness before the eyes of universal humanity. To Paul of Tarsus we owe above all men that great and on the whole cosmopolitanising conception.
WE have now in a certain sense accomplished our intention of tracing the evolution of gods and of God. We have shown how polytheism came to be, and how from it a certain particular group of men, the early Israelites, rose by slow degrees, through natural stages, to the monotheistic conception. It might seem, therefore, as though the task we set before ourselves was now quite completed. Nevertheless, many abstruse and difficult questions still lie before us. Our problem as yet is hardly half solved. We have still to ask, I think, How did this purely local and national Hebrew deity advance to the conquest of the civilised world? How from an obscure corner of Lower Syria did the god of a small tribe of despised and barbaric tributaries slowly live down the great conquering deities of Babylon and Susa, of Hellas and Italy? And again, we have further to enquire, Why do most of the modern nations which have nominally adopted monotheism yet conceive of their god as compounded in some mystically incomprehensible fashion of Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In short, I am not satisfied with tracing the idea of a god from the primitive mummy or the secondary ghost to the one supreme God of the ancient Hebrews; I desire also to follow on that developed concept till it merges at last in the triune God of modern Christendom. For, naturally, it is the god in whom men believe here and now that most of all concerns and interests us.
I may also add that, incidentally to this supplementary enquiry, we shall come upon several additional traits in the idea of deity and several important sources of earlier godhead, the consideration of which we had to postpone before till a more convenient season. We shall find that the process of tracking down Christianity to its hidden springs suggests to us many aspects of primitive religion which we were compelled to neglect in our first hasty synthesis.
The reader must remember that in dealing with so complex a subject as that of human beliefs and human cults, it is impossible ever to condense the whole of the facts at once into a single conspectus. We cannot grasp at a time the entire mass of evidence. While we are following out one clue, we must neglect another. It is only by examining each main set of components in analytical distinctness that we can proceed by degrees to a full and complete synthetic reconstruction of the whole vast fabric. We must therefore correct and supplement in the sequel much that may have seemed vague, inaccurate, or insufficient in our preliminary survey.
The Christian religion with which we have next to deal bases itself fundamentally upon the personality of a man, by name Jesus, commonly described as the Christ, that is to say “the anointed.” Of this most sacred and deified person it is affirmed by modern Christianity, and has been affirmed by orthodox Christians from a very early period, that he was not originally a mere man, afterwards taken into the godhead, but that he was born from the first the son of God, that is to say, of the Hebrew Jahweh; that he existed previously from all time; that he was miraculously conceived of a virgin mother; that he was crucified and buried; that on the third day he arose from the dead; and that he is now a living and distinct person in a divine and mystically-united Trinity. I propose to show in the subsequent chapters how far all these conceptions were already familiar throughout the world in which Christianity was promulgated, and to how large an extent the new religion owed its rapid success to the fact that it was but a résumé or idealised embodiment of all the chief conceptions already common to the main cults of Mediterranean civilisation. At the moment when the empire was cosmopolitanising the world, Christianity began to cosmopolitanise religion, by taking into itself whatever was central, common, and universal in the worship of the peoples among whom it originated.
We will begin with the question of the incarnation, which lies at the very root of the Christian concept.
I have said already that in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, “The God was the Dead King, the King was the Living God.” This is true, literally and absolutely. Since the early kings are gods, the present kings, their descendants, are naturally also gods by descent; their blood is divine; they differ in nature as well as in position from mere common mortals. While they live, they are gods on earth; when they die, they pass over to the community of the gods their ancestors, and share with them a happy and regal immortality. We have seen how this essential divinity of the Pharaoh is a prime article in the religious faith of the Egyptian Pyramid-builders. And though in later days, when a Greek dynasty, not of the old divine native blood, bore sway in Egypt, this belief in the divinity of the king grew fainter, yet to the very last the Ptolemies and the Cleopatras bear the title of god or goddess, and carry in their hands the sacred tau or crux ansata, the symbol and mark of essential divinity.
The inference made in Egypt that the children of gods must be themselves divine was also made in most other countries, especially in those where similar great despotisms established themselves at an early grade of culture. Thus in Peru, the Incas were gods. They were the children of the Sun; and when they died, it was said that their father, the Sun, had sent to fetch them. The Mexican kings were likewise gods, with full control of the course of nature; they swore at their accession to make the sun shine, the rain fall, the rivers flow, and the earth bring forth her fruit in due season. How they could promise all this seems at first a little difficult for us to conceive; but it will become more comprehensible at a later stage of our investigation, when we come to consider the gods of cultivation: even at present, if we remember that kings are children of the Sun, and that sacred trees, sacred groves, and sacred wells are closely connected with the tombs of their ancestors, we can guess at the beginning of such a mental connexion. Thus the Chinese emperor is the Son of Heaven; he is held responsible to his people for the occurrence of drought or other serious derangements of nature. The Parthian kings of the Arsacid house, says Mr. Frazer, to whom I am greatly indebted for most of the succeeding facts, styled themselves brothers of the sun and moon, and were worshipped as deities. Numberless other cases are cited by Mr. Frazer, who was the first to point out the full importance of this widespread belief in man-gods. I shall follow him largely in the subsequent discussion of this cardinal subject, though I shall often give to the facts an interpretation slightly different from that which he would allow to be the correct one. For to me, godhead springs always from the primitive Dead Man, while to Mr. Frazer it is spiritual or animistic in origin.
Besides these human gods who are gods by descent from deified ancestors, there is another class of gods who are gods by inspiration or indwelling of the divine spirit, that is to say of some ghost or god who temporarily or permanently inhabits the body of a living man. The germ-idea of such divine possession we may see in the facts of epilepsy, catalepsy, dream, and madness. In all such cases of abnormal nervous condition it seems to primitive man, as it still seemed to the Jews of the age of the Gospels, that the sufferer is entered or seized upon by some spirit, who bodily inhabits him. The spirit may throw the man down, or may speak through his mouth in strange unknown tongues; it may exalt him so that he can perform strange feats of marvellous strength, or may debase him to a position of grovelling abjectness. By fasting and religious asceticism men and women can even artificially attain this state, when the god speaks through them, as he spoke through the mouth of the Pythia at Delphi. And fasting is always one of the religious exercises of god-possessed men, priests, monks, anchorites, and ascetics in general. Where races have learnt how to manufacture intoxicating drinks, or to express narcotic juices from plants, they also universally attribute the effects of such plants to the personal action of an inspiring spirit—an idea so persistent even into civilised ages that we habitually speak of alcoholic liquors as spirits. Both these ways of attaining the presence of an indwelling god are commonly practised among savages and half-civilised people.
When we recollect how we saw already that ancestral spirits may descend from time to time into the skulls that once were theirs, or into the clay or wooden images that represent them, and there give oracles, we shall not be surprised to find that they can thus enter at times into a human body, and speak through its lips, for good or for evil. Indeed, I have dwelt but little in this book on this migratory power and this ubiquitousness of the spirits, because I have desired to fix attention chiefly on that primary aspect of religion which is immediately and directly concerned with Worship; but readers familiar with such works as Dr. Tylor’s and Mr. Frazer’s will be well aware of the common power which spirits possess of projecting themselves readily into every part of nature. The faculty of possession or of divination is but one particular example of this well-known attribute. The mysteries and oracles of all creeds are full of such phenomena.
Certain persons, again, are born from the womb as incarnations of a god or an ancestral spirit. “Incarnate gods,” says Mr. Frazer, “are common in rude society. The incarnation may be temporary or permanent.... When the divine spirit has taken up its abode in a human body, the god-man is usually expected to vindicate his character by working miracles.” Mr. Frazer gives several excellent examples of both these classes. I extract a few almost verbatim.
Certain persons are possessed from time to time by a spirit or deity; while possession lasts, their own personality lies in abeyance, and the presence of the spirit is revealed by convulsive shakings and quiverings of the body. In this abnormal state, the man’s utterances are accepted as the voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through him. In Mangaia, for instance, the priests in whom the gods took up their abode were called god-boxes or gods. Before giving oracles, they drank an intoxicating liquor, and the words they spoke in their frenzy were then regarded as divine. In other cases, the inspired person produces the desired condition of intoxication by drinking the fresh blood of a victim, human or animal, which, as we shall see hereafter, is probably itself an avatar of the inspiring god. In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a woman, who had to observe the rule of chastity, tasted its blood, and then gave oracles. At Ægira in Achæa the priestess of the Earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into her cave to prophesy. (Note in passing that caves, the places of antique burial, are also the usual places for prophetic inspiration.) In southern India, the so-called devil-dancer drinks the blood of a goat, and then becomes seized with the divine afflatus. He is worshipped as a deity, and bystanders ask him questions requiring superhuman knowledge to answer. Mr. Frazer extends this list of oracular practices by many other striking instances, for which I would refer the reader to the original volume.
Of permanent living human gods, inspired by the constant indwelling of a deity, Mr. Frazer also gives several apt examples. In the Marquesas Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield supernatural control over the elements. They could give or withhold rain and good harvests. Human sacrifices were offered them to appease their wrath. “A missionary has described one of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a very old man who lived in a large house within an enclosure.” (A temple in its temenos.) “In the house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the house and on the trees around it were hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered the enclosure, except the persons dedicated to the service of the god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed might ordinary people penetrate into the precinct. This human god received more sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on a sort of scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and offerings were sent to him from every side.” Indeed, throughout the South Sea Islands, each island had usually a man who embodied its deity. Such men were called gods, and were regarded as of divine substance. The man-god was sometimes a king; oftener he was a priest or a subordinate chief. The gods of Samoa were sometimes permanently incarnate in men, who gave oracles, received offerings (occasionally of human flesh), healed the sick, answered prayer, and generally performed all divine functions. Of the Fijians it is said: “There appears to be no certain line of demarcation between departed spirits and gods, nor between gods and living men, for many of the priests and old chiefs are considered as sacred persons, and not a few of them will also claim to themselves the right of divinity. ‘I am a god,’ Tuikilakila would say; and he believed it too.” There is said to be a sect in Orissa who worship the Queen of England as their chief divinity; and another sect in the Punjab worshipped during his lifetime the great General Nicholson.
Sometimes, I believe, kings are divine by birth, as descendants of gods; but sometimes divinity is conferred upon them with the kingship, as indeed was the case even in the typical instance of Egypt. Tanatoa, king of Raiatea, was deified by a certain ceremony performed at the chief temple. He was made a god before the gods his ancestors, as Celtic chiefs received the chieftainship standing on the sacred stone of their fathers. As one of the deities of his subjects, therefore, the king was worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and honoured with sacrifices. The king of Tahiti at his inauguration received a sacred girdle of red and yellow feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but also identified him with the heavenly gods. Compare the way in which the gods of Egypt make the king one of themselves, as represented in the bas-reliefs, by the presentation of the divine tau. In the Pelew Islands, a god may incarnate himself in a common person; this lucky man is thereupon raised to sovereign rank, and rules as god and king over the community. Not unsimilar is the mode of selection of a Grand Lama. In later stages, the king ceases to be quite a god, but retains the anointment, the consecration on a holy stone, and the claim to “divine right”; he also shows some last traces of deity in his divine power to heal diseases, which fades away at last into the practice of “touching for king’s evil.” On all these questions, again, Mr. Frazer’s great work is a perfect thesaurus of apposite instances. I abstain from quoting his whole two volumes.
But did ideas of this character still survive in the Mediterranean world of the first and second centuries, where Christianity was evolved? Most undoubtedly they did. In Egypt, the divine line of the Ptolemies had only just become extinct. In Rome itself, the divine Cæsar had recently undergone official apotheosis; the divine Augustus had ruled over the empire as the adopted son of the new-made god; and altars rose in provincial cities to the divine spirit of the reigning Trajan or Hadrian. Indeed, both forms of divinity were claimed indirectly for the god Julius; he was divine by apotheosis, but he was also descended from the goddess Venus. So the double claim was made for the central personage of the Christian faith: he was the son of God—that is to say of Jahweh; but he was also of kingly Jewish origin, a descendant of David, and in the genealogies fabricated for him in the Gospels extreme importance is attached to this pretended royal ancestry. Furthermore, how readily men of the Mediterranean civilisation could then identify living persons with gods we see in the familiar episode of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. Incarnation, in short, was a perfectly ordinary feature of religion and daily life as then understood. And to oriental ideas in particular, the conception was certainly no novelty. “Even an infant king,” say the laws of Manu, which go to the root of so much eastern thinking, “must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere mortal: for he is a great deity in human form.”
To most modern thinkers, however, it would seem at first sight like a grave difficulty in the way of accepting the deity of an ordinary man that he should have suffered a violent death at the hands of his enemies. Yet this fact, instead of standing in the way of acceptance of Christ’s divinity, is really almost a guarantee and proof of it. For, strange as it sounds to us, the human gods were frequently or almost habitually put to death by their votaries. The secret of this curious ritual and persistent custom has been ingeniously deciphered for us by Mr. Frazer, whose book is almost entirely devoted to these two main questions, “Why do men kill their gods?” and “Why do they eat and drink their flesh and blood under the form of bread and wine?” We must go over some of the same ground here in rapid summary, with additional corollaries; and we must also bring Mr. Frazer’s curious facts into line with our general principles of the origin of godhead.
Meanwhile, it may be well to add here two similar instances of almost contemporary apotheoses. The dictator Julius was killed by a band of reactionary conspirators, and yet was immediately raised to divine honours. A little later, Antinous, the favourite of the emperor Hadrian, devoted himself to death in order to avert misfortune from his master; he was at once honoured with temples and worship. The belief that it is expedient that “one man should die for the people,” and that the person who so dies is a god in human shape, formed, as we shall see, a common component of many faiths, and especially of the faiths of the eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, a little later, each Christian martyrdom is followed as a matter of course by canonisation—that is to say, by minor apotheosis. Mr. Frazer has traced the genesis of this group of allied beliefs in the slaughter of the man-god in the most masterly manner. They spring from a large number of converging ideas, some of which can only come out in full as we proceed in later chapters to other branches of our subject.
In all parts of the world, one of the commonest prerogatives and functions of the human god is the care of the weather. As representative of heaven, it is his business to see that rain falls in proper quantities, and that the earth brings forth her increase in due season. But, god though he is, he must needs be coerced if he does not attend to this business properly. Thus, in West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the king have failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him with ropes, and take him to the grave of his deified forefathers, that he may obtain from them the needful change in the weather. Here we see in the fullest form the nature of the relation between dead gods and living ones. The Son is the natural mediator between men and the Father. Among the Antaymours of Madagascar, the king is responsible for bad crops and all other misfortunes. The ancient Scythians, when food was scarce, put their kings in bonds. The Banjars in West Africa ascribe to their king the power of causing rain or fine weather. As long as the climate is satisfactory, they load him with presents of grain and cattle. But if long drought or rain does serious harm, they insult and beat him till the weather changes. The Burgundians deposed their king if he failed to make their crops grow to their satisfaction.
Further than that, certain tribes have even killed their kings in times of scarcity. In the days of the Swedish king Domalde, a mighty famine broke out, which lasted several years, and could not be stayed by human or animal sacrifices. So, in a great popular assembly held at Upsala, the chiefs decided that King Domalde himself was the cause of the scarcity, and must be sacrificed for good seasons. Then they slew him, and smeared with his blood the altars of the gods. Here we must recollect that the divine king is himself a god, the descendant of gods, and he is sacrificed to the offended spirits of his own forefathers. We shall see hereafter how often similar episodes occur—how the god is sacrificed, himself to himself; how the Son is sacrificed to the Father, both being gods; and how the Father sacrifices his Son, to make a god of him. To take another Scandinavian example from Mr. Frazer’s collection: in the reign of King Olaf, there came a great dearth, and the people thought that the fault was the king’s, because he was sparing in sacrifices. So they mustered an army and marched against him; then they surrounded his palace and burnt it, with him within it, “giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.” Many points must here be noted. Olaf himself was of divine stock, a descendant of Odin. He is burnt as an offering to his father, much as the Carthaginians burnt their sons, or the king of Moab his first-born, as sacrifices to Melcarth and to Chemosh. The royal and divine person is here offered up to his own fathers, just as on the cross of the founder of Christendom the inscription ran, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,” and just as in Christian theology God offers his Son as a sacrifice to his own offended justice.
Other instances elsewhere point to the same analogies. In 1814, a pestilence broke out among the reindeer of the Chukches (a Siberian tribe); and the shamans declared that the beloved chief Koch must be sacrificed to the angry gods (probably his ancestors); so the chief’s own son stabbed him with a dagger. On the coral island of Niue in the South Pacific there once reigned a line of kings; but they were also “high-priests” (that is to say, divine representatives of divine ancestors); and they were supposed to make the crops grow, for a reason which will come out more fully in the sequel. In times of scarcity, the people “grew angry with them and killed them,” or more probably, as I would interpret the facts, sacrificed them for crops to their own deified ancestors. So in time there were no kings left, and the monarchy ceased altogether on the island.
The divine kings being thus responsible for rain and wind, and for the growth of crops, whose close dependence upon them we shall further understand hereafter, it is clear that they are persons of the greatest importance and value to the community. Moreover, in the ideas of early men, their spirit is almost one with that of external nature, over which they exert such extraordinary powers. A subtle sympathy seems to exist between the king and the world outside. The sacred trees which embody his ancestors; the crops, which, as we shall see hereafter, equally embody them; the rain-clouds in which they dwell; the heaven they inhabit;—all these, as it were, are parts of the divine body, and therefore by implication part of the god-king’s, who is but the avatar of his deified fathers. Hence, whatever affects the king, affects the sky, the crops, the rain, the people. There is even reason to believe that the man-god, representative of the ancestral spirit and tribal god, is therefore the representative and embodiment of the tribe itself—the soul of the nation.
L'état, c’est moi is no mere personal boast of Louis Quatorze; it is the belated survival of an old and once very powerful belief, shared in old times by kings and peoples. Whatever hurts the king, hurts the people, and hurts by implication external nature. Whatever preserves the king from danger, preserves and saves the world and the nation.
Mr. Frazer has shown many strange results of these early beliefs—which he traces, however, to the supposed primitive animism, and not (as I have done) to the influence of the ghost-theory. Whichever interpretation we accept, however, his facts at least are equally valuable. He calls attention to the number of kingly taboos which are all intended to prevent the human god from endangering or imperilling his divine life, or from doing anything which might react hurtfully upon nature and the welfare of his people. The man-god is guarded by the strictest rules, and surrounded by precautions of the utmost complexity. He may not set his sacred foot on the ground, because he is a son of heaven; he may not eat or drink with his sacred mouth certain dangerous, impure, or unholy foods; he may not have his sacred hair cut, or his sacred nails pared; he must preserve intact his divine body, and every part of it—the incarnation of the community,—lest evil come of his imprudence or his folly.
The Mikado, for example, was and still is regarded as an incarnation of the sun, the deity who rules the entire universe, gods and men included. The greatest care must therefore be taken both by him and of him. His whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that no act of his may upset the established order of nature. Lest he should touch the earth, he used to be carried wherever he went on men’s shoulders. He could not expose his sacred person to the open air, nor eat out of any but a perfectly new vessel. In every way his sanctity and his health were jealously guarded, and he was treated like a person whose security was important to the whole course of nature.
Mr. Frazer quotes several similar examples, of which the most striking is that of the high pontiff of the Zapotecs, an ancient people of Southern Mexico. This spiritual lord, a true Pope or Lama, governed Yopaa, one of the chief cities of the kingdom, with absolute dominion. He was looked upon as a god “whom earth was not worthy to hold or the sun to shine upon.” He profaned his sanctity if he touched the common ground with his holy foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their shoulders were chosen from the members of the highest families; he hardly deigned to look on anything around him; those who met him prostrated themselves humbly on the ground, lest death should overtake them if they even saw his divine shadow. (Compare the apparition of Jahweh to Moses.) A rule of continence was ordinarily imposed upon him; but on certain days in the year which were high festivals, it was usual for him to get ceremonially and sacramentally drunk. On such days, we may be sure, the high gods peculiarly entered into him with the intoxicating pulque, and the ancestral spirits reinforced his godhead. While in this exalted state (“full of the god,” as a Greek or Roman would have said) the divine pontiff received a visit from one of the most beautiful of the virgins consecrated to the service of the gods. If the child she bore him was a son, it succeeded in due time to the throne of the Zapotecs. We have here again an instructive mixture of the various ideas out of which such divine kingship and godship is constructed.
It might seem at first sight a paradoxical corollary that people who thus safeguard and protect their divine king, the embodiment of nature, should also habitually and ceremonially kill him. Yet the apparent paradox is, from the point of view of the early worshipper, both natural and reasonable. We read of the Congo negroes that they have a supreme pontiff whom they regard as a god upon earth, and all-powerful in heaven. But, “if he were to die a natural death, they thought the world would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power and merit, would immediately be annihilated.” This idea of a god as the creator and supporter of all things, without whom nothing would be, is of course a familiar component element of the most advanced theology. But many nations which worship human gods carry out the notion to its logical conclusion in the most rigorous manner. Since the god is a man, it would obviously be quite wrong to let him grow old and weak; since thereby the whole course of nature might be permanently enfeebled; rain would but dribble; crops would grow thin; rivers would trickle away; and the race he ruled would dwindle to nothing. Hence senility must never overcome the sacred man-god; he must be killed in the fulness of his strength and health (say, about his thirtieth year), so that the indwelling spirit, yet young and fresh, may migrate unimpaired into the body of some newer and abler representative. Mr. Frazer was the first, I believe, to point out this curious result of primitive human reasoning, and to illustrate it by numerous and conclusive instances.